World Premiere: December 30, 1938
Last HSO Performance: February 16, 2020
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 6 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, tenor saxophone, timpani, percussion, piano, harp and strings
Duration: 90 minutes
Sergei Prokofiev
Born April 23, 1891 in Sontzovka, Russia.
Died March 5, 1953 in Moscow.
When Prokofiev returned to Russia in 1933 after his long sojourn in the West, he had already acquired a reputation as a composer of ballet. His first balletic effort had been the volcanic Ala and Lolly written for Diaghilev in Paris in 1914, whose music is better known in its concert form as the Scythian Suite. Though Diaghilev did not like the piece and refused to stage it, he remained convinced of Prokofiev’s talent and commissioned Chout (“The Buffoon”) from him in 1921 and produced it with his Ballet Russe. Le Pas d’acier (“The Steel Step”) followed in 1927, and The Prodigal Son in 1928, the last new ballet Diaghilev produced before his death the following year. Sur le Borysthène (“On the Dnieper”) was staged, unsuccessfully, by the Paris Opéra in 1932. The last two of these works showed a move away from the spiky musical language of Prokofiev’s earlier years toward a simpler, more lyrical style, and the Kirov Theater in Leningrad took them as evidence in 1934 that he should be commissioned to compose a full-length, three-act ballet on one of the theater’s classic stories of romance — Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
Prokofiev was immediately taken with the Leningrad Kirov’s proposal for a Romeo and Juliet ballet, and spent much time during the spring of 1935 with the company’s stage director, Sergei Radlov, working out a detailed scenario. Enough of the music was composed during the summer at Prokofiev’s secluded house in Polenovo, near Tarusa, that he could write to a friend in late July, “Juliet is already tripping through the third act.” For reasons never made clear (had the outspoken Prokofiev tread on some sensitive political toe?), the Kirov withdrew its offer to produce the ballet, and a contract with the Moscow Bolshoi was arranged instead. A tryout of the music was given in the Beethoven Hall of the Bolshoi Theater in October, but failed to ignite enthusiasm for its balletic potential. “Undanceable,” declared some. V.V. Konin, in a dispatch to the Musical Courier, criticized “the awkward incongruity between the realistic idiom of the musical language, which successfully characterizes the individualism of the Shakespearean images, and the blind submission to the worst traditions of the old form.” This last comment referred to the “happy ending” of the original scenario, in which Romeo and Juliet survive to join in the finale. (“Dead people don’t dance,” reasoned Prokofiev.) Whatever its motive, the Bolshoi broke its contract to stage the ballet, so Prokofiev turned to the expedient of extracting music from the complete score for concert performance. Two orchestral suites were assembled and heard in Russia and the United States before the complete ballet was premiered, in Brno, Czechoslovakia in December 1938, a production in which the composer took no part. A third orchestral suite dates from 1944.
At about the time of the Brno performance, Prokofiev met the choreographer Leonid Lavrovsky. Lavrovsky, building on the reputation the Romeo and Juliet music had acquired in its concert performances, finally convinced the Leningrad Kirov to stage the work. A satisfactory way was found to restore the tragic close of the original play. At a celebratory supper party following the successful opening of Romeo and Juliet, delayed for a half-decade in its Russian premiere, Galina Ulanova, the production’s prima ballerina, ended her toast with a bit of fractured Shakespeare: “Never was a story of more woe/Than this of Prokofiev’s music for Romeo.” Romeo and Juliet has since become one of the most popular of all full-length ballets.
©2024 Dr. Richard E. Rodda